“Tucker Coe” is one of several pseudonyms used by Donald E. Westlake. And Mitchell Tobin, the narrator of Don’t Lie to Me and of four other novels published under the Coe name, is in many ways Westlake’s most fascinating creation.

Tobin is an ex-New York City cop who was thrown off the force in disgrace when his partner was shot down while covering for him: Tobin at the time was in bed with a woman named Linda Campbell, another man’s wife.

Unable to reconcile his guilt, Tobin has withdrawn to the point where little matters in his life except the high wall he is building in the back yard of his Queens home — a continuing project that symbolizes his self-imposed prison and isolation.

His forgiving wife Kate and his teen-age son are unable to penetrate those internal walls; no one can, it seems. Occasionally, however, someone from his past or his present manages to persuade him to do this or that “simple” job, thus creating circumstances which force Tobin to utilize his detective’s training.

The combined result of these cases, as critic Francis M. Nevins has noted, is that Tobin “builds up a store of therapeutic experiences from which he slowly comes to realize that he is not unique in his isolation and guilt, and slowly begins to accept himself and return to the real world.”

Don’t Lie to Me is the last of the five Tobin novels, the final stage of his mental rehabilitation. He has been given a private investigator’s license and is working as a night watchman in Manhattan’s Museum of American Graphic Art, and before long Linda Campbell, his former lover, about whom he has ambivalent feelings, reappears in his life.

Tobin then discovers the naked body of an unidentified murder victim in one of the museum rooms. Further complications include pressure from hostile cops and from a group of small-time hoodlums with a grudge against Tobin.

Against his will, he is forced to pursue his own investigation into the murder, and eventually to reconcile his feelings toward Linda Campbell — and toward himself. The ending is violent, powerful, ironic, and appropriate.

The other four Tobin novels are Kinds of Love, Kinds of Death (1966), Murder Among Children (1968), Wax Apple (1970), and A Jade in Aries (1971).

It is tempting to say that more Tobin novels would have been welcome, but this is not really the case. Westlake said everything there is to say about Mitch Tobin in these five books, what amounts to a perfect quintology; any additional novels would have seem contrived to capitalize on an established series character.

I read the Tucker Coe novels back in 1987 and my notes indicate that the novels should be read in order, or at least Kinds of Love, Kinds of Death should be read first. Mitch Tobin has some mental problems and guilt that he handles with the symbolic building of the wall in his back yard. I agree with Pronzini that this is Westlake’s most fascinating creation. Very depressing novels but the reader gets to see Tobin basically recover and return to a somewhat normal life. Along the way he has some interesting experiences such as spending all of one novel in an insane asylum in order to find out who is causing the patients to have accidents(Wax Apple).